Selectively picturing?
By bridgetmarthaSeptember 21, 2014 - 15:39
Garland-Thomson’s “Picturing People with Disabilities” presents a new side to the framing of disability in art. The images, symbols, and messages we discussed last week all had some sort of motive, these portraits do not, and herein, I believe, lays the distinction. Portraits are specifically for the person painted and the audience. Common depictions of disability are meant to evoke, as Garland-Thomson suggested, “the sensational, sensual, or pathological” (23), treating the people featured in them as objects to be stared at, pitied, or studied by the gaze of a stranger.